Beyond the Binary: Pre-Ingest Preservation of Metadata

This paper describes some of the challenges the National Library of New Zealand has faced in our efforts to maintain the authenticity of born digital collection items from first transfer to the Library through ingest into our digital preservation system. We assume that assuring the authenticity and integrity of digital objects means preserving the binary objects plus metadata about the objects. We discuss the efforts and challenges of the Library to preserve contextual metadata around the binary object, in particular filenames and file dates. We discuss these efforts from the two perspectives of the digital archivist and the digital preservation analyst, and how these two perspectives inform our current thinking.